Most dangerous jobs assume that mistakes and unexpected failures will happen — and they give workers protection.
Bomb disposal teams get bomb suits. Welders get helmets and gloves. Construction workers get hard hats.
Office workers get… accountability.
And when a project goes sideways, the person closest to the work often becomes the blast shield while everyone else explains why it wasn't really their fault.
That distinction matters because accountability and blame are not the same thing. Good organizations build systems that make mistakes survivable: clear assumptions, decision logs, blameless postmortems, leaders who provide cover, and enough psychological safety to say “I don't know” before uncertainty turns into failure.
The purpose of safety equipment isn't to make failure impossible. It's to make failure survivable.
I wrote more about what the office-worker equivalent of a hard hat should look like:
https://mbernier.com/articles/office-work-has-no-safety-equipment